Darwen Arkwright and the School of Shadows (9 page)

Revelations

“H
ow's the leg?”
asked Eileen.

Darwen wasn't sure how long it had been since they had made their escape: twenty minutes? Perhaps more. Eileen had recovered much of her composure, but she was quiet, and the irritation that had characterized his babysitter as long as he had known her was gone, so that he found himself gazing at her, struggling to accept the idea that this was the same person who had bossed him and ignored him and generally treated him like an unpleasant inconvenience for the last nine months.

“A little better, thanks,” he said.

Rich produced an oversized handkerchief and Alex wound it tightly from Darwen's knee to his hip.

“You blow your nose on this?” said Alex to Rich. “It looks like a tablecloth, man.”

Darwen grinned in spite of himself. The wound still hurt a great deal, but the bleeding seemed to have stopped.

The portal had taken them into a Silbrican version of the same mansion. The rooms were roughly identical to those on the Atlanta side, but this one had large, glorious windows overlooking acres of immaculate, manicured garden, which reminded Darwen of a stately home he had visited in England with his parents. No one had stepped outside yet, but they could make out lawns and flower beds and carefully clipped hedges laid out in geometric patterns as far as the eye could see.

Darwen was lying in a sunny sitting room on a pale couch, his feet up, while Eileen paced and Rich and Alex relived their escape from the watchtower. Rich seemed to have grown a couple of inches, the way he carried himself now. He could barely keep from laughing with delight at somehow having become a mirroculist, and no matter how much Alex teased him for being pleased with himself, he couldn't stop grinning.

“So you can open portals,” she remarked. “Big deal. I could do that months ago. You gonna start singing and dancing like me too, copycat?”

“No one wants to sing and dance like you, Alex,” said Rich, unoffended.

“They want to,” Alex rejoined. “They just can't.”

“I think I'll take opening dimensional portals over being one of your backup singers,” Rich quipped, gazing out at the garden through the tall windows.

Darwen smiled because he knew how delighted Rich was, how proud, but he couldn't help wondering where this left him. Darwen had mockingly imagined opening portals at the school talent gala because, as Mr. Sumners had shrewdly pointed out, he didn't have any other talents. Now even this had been taken away from him.

No
,
he reminded himself,
not taken away. I can still do it. For now. It's just that other people can too. And that's good because they are my friends and it makes them happy.

Or so he told himself.

“Rich Haggerty, the mirroculist.” Alex sighed. “Must be some kind of mistake. Like the Guardians wanted to give me even more power and some of it landed on you. Something like that.”

“This just eats you up, doesn't it?” Rich cooed, grinning sideways at her. “No more waiting for you to open the portals for me.
No thanks, Alex, I got this one.
 . . .”

“You're quite the comedian,” Alex muttered, trying to hide her smile. “You should get yourself a red nose and some clown shoes. Man, the Guardians' standards sure are slipping. I guess they let
anyone
become a mirroculist these days. . . .”

“No,” said Eileen, absently, but so thoughtfully that the others stopped sparring to look at her. “They don't. There should be one mirroculist. That's how it works. One. Not two, and certainly not three. It doesn't make any sense. Mirroculists aren't made, they just are. One at a time.”

She looked more than serious. She seemed almost sad.

“How does that work?” asked Darwen, sitting up awkwardly. “I mean, it's not destiny, right? Because I don't believe in destiny.”

“I'm not a philosopher,” said Eileen.

Yesterday, Darwen thought, that statement in his babysitter's mouth would have struck him as extraordinarily funny, but now he didn't know what to think.

“All I know,” said Eileen, ceasing her pacing and sitting in a large wing-backed leather chair, “is that for centuries there has been one mirroculist. After each one lost the gift, another would be discovered, but sometimes it took time. There have been years when no one could open the portals between our world and Silbrica.”

After each one lost the gift.

The phrase rang in Darwen's head like a mournful bell in the distance.

“How long have you been working for Mr. Peregrine?” asked Rich.

“For the last three years,” Eileen replied.

“But you're . . . you know, human, right?” Rich pressed.

“Obviously,” said Eileen, a flicker of her former irritation coming back into her face.

“Three years?” said Darwen, sitting up properly now.

Eileen shot him a look, and there was something a little hunted in her expression, like she wished she hadn't said that.

“So when you started working for my aunt, you already knew Mr. Peregrine?” he pressed.

“Sure.” She shrugged, as if the point was of no consequence, though Darwen thought she avoided his eyes.

“Wait a minute,” said Darwen, giving her a hard look. “You knew the day I met him, the day he gave me the mirror. Right?” His voice had an edge to it. “You told him who I was, or maybe he told you? Maybe he got you to apply for my aunt's babysitting job, yeah? Was that how it worked? She never told me how she met you.”

Eileen said nothing, and Darwen felt the color in his face rise.

“All that time I thought you were ignoring me, talking on your phone and stuff,” he said, “you were spying on me!”

“I did what Octavius asked,” said Eileen.

“And you somehow connected me with him,” said Darwen, trying to make sense of it all, astonished as the pieces fell into place.

“The moment you came to Atlanta, he was going to connect with you,” said Eileen, suddenly frank and forceful. “That wasn't me. I just told him where you would be and when. He released the flittercrake into the mall to lead you to the shop, not me.”

“He
led
me to the shop?” Darwen gasped. Rich and Alex were frozen in silence, watching.

“He had to!” Eileen replied. “Everything suggested that you would be the new mirroculist. He had to meet you to be sure.”

Ask him how he knew your name
, Darwen thought. Those had been Scarlett Oppertune's last words. Mr. Peregrine had known who he was, known what he might be, and the gift of the mirror had been a test, plain and simple. Lightborne had admitted as much.

“Wait,” said Darwen, shaking his head, like he was trying to clear it. “How did he know I was going to be a mirroculist?”

“The Guardians had been . . .” Eileen hesitated, picking her words carefully. “Monitoring you.”

“But I was just a normal kid!” Darwen shot back. “This mirror stuff didn't start till I came here!”

“The abilities of the mirroculist,” Eileen recited, as if she was remembering something she had read long ago, “don't start at birth. They begin as the subject crosses into adulthood.”

“I'm not an adult!” Darwen shouted back. “Look at me! I'm a kid.”

“Sometimes,” Eileen said, even more carefully, her eyes fixed on the carpet, “an emotional trauma accelerates the process.”

Darwen was about to yell back at her when the weight of the words struck him and he fell silent. Alex was also looking down. Rich was staring at him, his mouth open, his face a mask of shock.

“Emotional trauma,” Darwen repeated.

“Yes,” said Eileen. “I'm sorry, Darwen, but it's true. You might never have become a mirroculist if it wasn't for the road accident that killed your parents. It pushed you over the edge and activated your abilities. No one could have known that for sure, but when the Guardians learned that a possible mirroculist was coming, we had to find out. I was positioned to keep an eye on you and make sure you met Mr. Peregrine. I'm sorry that I couldn't tell you. It was for your own protection.”

Darwen said nothing. For a little while Silbrica had been a kind of home for him, a refuge from his loneliness and sadness; it had been an enchanting secret, a place where he was special. But now it seemed that had only been possible because of what had happened to him, what he had lost. In a moment of startling clarity, he saw that he would give it all up—the portals, Moth's forest, all the beauty and adventure of Silbrica—to have his family back the way it had been.

“My aunt,” said Darwen at last. “Did she know?”

This took Eileen so completely off guard that she actually laughed.

“Not a clue,” said Eileen. “As far as she was concerned, I just showed up at the right time and was far more flexible than the other babysitters she interviewed.”

“But you seemed so . . .” Darwen tried to find the word.

“Uninterested,” Rich supplied.

“Obnoxious?” offered Alex. “Insufferable? Jackassy?”

Eileen gave a half smile and a nod of acknowledgment. “Gonna be a theater minor when I go to college,” she said. “If I ever get to.”

“Majoring in what?” asked Alex, skeptical.

“Physics, I think,” Eileen said with a self-deprecating shrug.

“Yeah?” said Rich, pleased and impressed. “Cool.”

“But wait,” said Darwen. “If it's so rare to be a mirroculist, and my gift was triggered by some emotional trauma, what about them?”

He nodded at Alex and Rich, who returned his gaze a little guiltily.

“No idea,” said Eileen, and there it was again in her face: that deliberate blankness, as if she was hiding some feeling even from herself. “When the Guardians heard that you opened a portal,” she said to Alex, “they went nuts. First they didn't believe it. Then they went into full-on research mode trying to figure how it was possible, but no one came up with anything. When they find out he's a mirroculist too . . .” she said, glancing at Rich. The sentence trailed off, and she just shrugged and shook her head.

“So,” said Darwen, “you're still working for the Guardians?”

“Right now,” said Eileen, “I just work for Octavius. He was my link to the council. Since he disappeared, I've communicated with them only once, through a Spanish agent of theirs. . . .”

“Jorge,” said Alex and Rich together.

“Right,” she said. “You know him?”

“Let's say our paths have crossed,” said Darwen. “What did he tell you to do?”

“Keep you safe,” said Eileen. “Help you find Octavius, and help you gather allies to stand with us against Greyling.”

She sounded uneasy, even a little resentful that after her years of service, Darwen—who was no more than a kid in her eyes—was in charge.

“So Greyling hates you too,” said Alex, grinning. “I'm pretty sure he hates us more, but at least we're on the same side.”

She said it so easily, reveling in it like it was a badge of honor, that all the tension evaporated. Eileen started to laugh and soon they were all laughing with her. For a moment all the danger they had passed through, all the terrors surely to come, seemed no more than a game, a bit of fun in which they got to be the good guys and nothing serious could possibly happen to them. They were just sitting in a fancy living room, basking in the softening light from the windows and chatting as if they were swapping stories from books. Darwen was the first to stop laughing, and he did so with a sudden sense of dread that made him wince with a pain as clear as that in his thigh.

“Well, one good thing's come from all this,” said Eileen.

“What's that?” asked Rich.

“I get to see Silbrica again,” said Eileen, beaming so that she looked like a completely different person.

“Mr. Peregrine didn't bring you across much?” Alex asked.

“What?” said Eileen, the smile evaporating. “No. He wasn't a mirroculist.”

“Isn't,” said Darwen, firmly.

“What?” asked Eileen.

“Mr. Peregrine
isn't
a mirroculist,” Darwen spelled out. “Not
wasn't
.”

“Right,” said Eileen. “Of course.”

He managed not to add that it was starting to seem like the old shopkeeper and Eileen were the only people who weren't mirroculists, because he didn't want to rain on Rich's parade. And it was, perhaps predictably, Rich who seemed most keen to press on.

“So now that we're here,” he said, “what are we going to do? Is there a way to find where those places we could see in the watchtower actually are? Mr. Peregrine was in one of those labs—”

“What?” snapped Eileen, so brusquely that Darwen glimpsed the old babysitter he had loathed for months. “You saw Octavius? Where?”

In all the confusion of the fight in the Atlanta mansion, Eileen had not had a chance to study the windows in the observatory. Now she was eager to learn all they had been able to see, after which her pacing took on the feel of a tiger in the zoo, glaring.